Down the Rabbit Hole
Page 6
Night had fallen, a dark, moonless night. Mom’s headlights cut two weak yellow beams in the blackness. Ingrid forgot about the land behind the tractor shed and the Ferrand Group. Dark and moonless: She understood the meaning of that right away. This night was made-to-order for doing what she had to do. Her mind was made up: Grampy and Benjamin Franklin stood behind her.
seven
DOWNSTAIRS MOM’S and Dad’s voices rose and fell in irregular patterns, like waves on the monitor of a sick patient. Ingrid got busy at the computer. MapQuest said that the distance from 99 Maple Lane to 341 Packer Street was 4.2 miles with lots of lefts and rights: a long and complicated journey at night. As Ingrid studied the map, she saw something she’d never realized before: Her neighborhood, Riverbend, and the Flats weren’t really that far apart as the bee flies, or the crow, or whatever the expression was. All you had to do was cut through the town woods. The distance looked like half as much as going by road, maybe even less.
Ingrid knew there were paths in the woods. She’d done lots of exploring back when Flanders was alive, knew how to get to the kettle pond and the big rock with RED RAIDERS RULE spray-painted on the side. Three or four paths came together at the big rock. She’d just have to find one leading off to the left, like so, and in what couldn’t be more than four or five minutes, she’d be popping out somewhere on Packer Street. From there she could simply read the house numbers. All she needed was a flashlight.
Ingrid searched around, found her camp flashlight in the closet, under her sleeping bag. She switched it on: nice and bright.
What else? Dark clothes. Ingrid chose jeans, brown hiking boots, a black fleece jacket, and a matching pompom hat that said STOWE on the front. She checked the time: 11:37. Mom’s and Dad’s voices had faded away. Ingrid stepped out of her room, listened. She heard the kettle whistling. That would be Mom, waiting up for Ty, who had a midnight curfew. Ingrid got in bed, lights off, clothes on, and waited.
A car pulled up outside at 12:05. A door banged shut and the car peeled away, which meant some older kid and not a parent was driving. A minute later, Mom said something that ended on a rising note, and Ty said something not much longer than a grunt. That would be Mom asking about his evening and Ty saying as little as possible. Then came his footsteps on the stairs, lots of flowing and splattering liquid sounds from the bathroom, footsteps again. To her surprise, they kept going, past Ty’s bedroom. There was a soft knock on her half-open door.
“Ingrid?” Ty said. “You awake?”
“Yeah.”
“Hear you had a good game today,” he said. “Nice job.”
“Thanks,” Ingrid said. Wow. Had that ever happened before, or anything even close? No.
“Night.”
“Night.”
Ty went into his room and closed the door.
Ingrid waited for him to fall asleep, waited for the house to go completely quiet. And while she waited, she had a thought: What about asking Ty to go with her? She’d never shared any secrets with him before, but she’d never had any to share, nothing important. He was her big brother, after all. What was the point in having a big brother if not for times like this?
Ingrid clipped the flashlight onto a belt loop, went down the hall, stood outside Ty’s door. She heard him talking in a low voice. He was on the phone. And what was that smell? She took a quiet sniff. Not quite the same smell as Grampy’s VO, but not that different. Ty had been drinking. The big-brother plan wasn’t going to work.
Down to the basement, across the TV room, maneuvering around all the unseen weights, to the walkout sliding door at the back of the house. It wasn’t locked. Ingrid took that for a sign. She slid it open without making the slightest sound and stepped into the night.
A surprisingly cold night, with the wind whipping across the patio, cutting through Ingrid’s fleece jacket. Behind her, a TV screen light shone in Mom and Dad’s room, sending a trembling blue oblong into the darkness. Ingrid skirted its edge, then hurried across the yard and into the trees.
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness. It came in different shades: the sky the lightest, a kind of charcoal; the tree trunks and branches, mostly bare, a little darker; the ground darker still; and the path black. Night was nothing to fear. The world stayed exactly as it was during the day—only the lighting changed, like when Mr. Rubino worked the board for the Prescott Players. Ingrid followed the trail into the woods, a path that seemed to shine like polished black coal. She didn’t even need the flashlight.
How about counting steps? Might be a good idea, giving her some idea of the distance. Ingrid started counting, had reached 679 when something rose in front of her, the same shade of darkness as the trees, but much bigger, big and looming. The rock? Ingrid switched on the flashlight. Yes, the rock, almost the size of a small hill, with RED RAIDERS RULE spray-painted on the side, plus peace signs, hearts with arrows through them, and a few anatomical scribbles. The rock already. This was going great. Griddie—night tracker extraordinaire.
Beyond the rock lay the Punch Bowl, a kettle pond formed by a long-ago glacier. Ingrid felt the rising dampness, cold on her face. Flanders had loved diving into the Punch Bowl for sticks she threw. Once Flanders got started, he just wouldn’t stop and he had this annoying way of poking you in the leg with the stick as a signal for more. He’d been a hyper dog, with a crazy tail-biting thing when he really went over the top, and he hadn’t liked being patted either. But she missed him, especially right now.
Ingrid studied the paths that came together by the big rock. There were four: the path she’d been on, another going right, around the Punch Bowl, a third leading straight ahead, and a fourth bearing left. Bingo. Ingrid cut the light and set off on the path bearing left.
The path took her up a long rise. The trees seemed to grow closer together, and maybe because of that the different shades of darkness began to blend and the path lost its polish, making it harder to see. But she didn’t want to switch on the flashlight; better not to see than to be seen.
Ingrid kept going, a little slower now, the only sounds her own breathing and the occasional crunch of a twig or acorn beneath her feet. She’d lost count. From above came a strange beat, heavy, regular, getting louder. Ingrid felt a whoosh of air above her head, and an instant later a branch creaked, very near. Oh my God. Flashlight. She jabbed the beam toward the sound. An owl, huge and white, with pointy devil ears, sat on a branch that overhung the path, less than ten feet away. Its eyes, the color of liquid gold, gazed right into the beam, maybe blinded. Ingrid had never seen an owl before, not in the wild. A funny thought. How could this be the wild? She was practically in her own backyard.
Somewhere far away a dog howled, very faint, but the owl seemed to hear. Its head turned slowly, reaching an impossible angle; then the owl spread its wings—so wide—and in two heavy flaps rose off the branch, out of the beam, and into the night. Ingrid switched off the flashlight, kept going. Was the owl another good sign? Had to be: She felt a sense of kinship with it, both of them up to something in the night woods.
The path leveled out, bent around an enormous tree trunk, rose again, and then began sloping down. A light blinked in the distance, then another, then a lot. Two or three minutes after that, Ingrid stepped out of the woods and into an alley behind a tall, narrow house. A window opened on the top story. Ingrid heard music. A lit cigarette came spinning out. The window closed. Ingrid stepped on the butt, squished it out.
She walked around the house, came out on the street, not far from the corner. It was quiet: no one around, cars parked on both sides, gingerbread houses, all run-down. None of the streetlights were working, so Ingrid had to go close to the corner to read the sign: Packer Street. She turned back to the narrow house, read the number by the porch light: 339. Ingrid recognized the darkened house next door but checked the number anyway, just to be sure: 341. She followed a narrow walkway around to the alley and stared up at the back of Cracked-Up Katie’s house, where not a glimmer of light showed.
There were four windows at the back of Cracked-Up Katie’s house: a basement window, barred over; one on the first floor; and two more above, out of reach. There was also a door, which she tried first. Locked, no surprise. She stepped over to the first-floor window, put her hands on the glass, pushed up. It didn’t budge. Was there anything lying in the alley she could stick in between the sill and the bottom of the window? Nothing she could see in the dark, and she couldn’t risk using the flash: Music leaked into the alley from 339, the thumping bass rappers liked. It might have been coming right out of the ground.
Ingrid knelt by the basement window, examined the grate. It was made of thick crisscrossed metal bars with arrowhead-shaped ends, the whole thing attached to the wooden siding of the house. Ingrid put her hand on one of the bars, gave a hopeless little tug. The grate came right off, screws or bolts or whatever they were ripping out of the rotten wood. She almost tipped over backward.
Ingrid examined the window. It wasn’t the kind that went up and down, more the kind attached at the top that might swing up and in if given a push. Ingrid gave it a push. It swung up and in, then got stuck, leaving an opening about a foot wide. She gazed in, saw nothing.
Ingrid got facedown on the ground, wriggled back into the opening feetfirst; not a very big opening, but all she needed. Halfway in, she felt around with her feet. No floor. She lowered herself a little more, a little more, still not finding it. She ended up hanging there in the basement, fully stretched and clinging to the windowsill, her feet dangling in midair.
Choice one: She could try to pull herself up, start over. That meant doing an actual pull-up. Ingrid had done pull-ups before, two in a row at soccer camp, for example, but she hadn’t been wearing boots and all these clothes. She tried an experimental little pull-up, rose an inch or so. She’d been much stronger in the summer.
Okay. Choice two: She could just let go. Alice, down the rabbit hole.
eight
HOW LONG A FALL? That was hard to judge, but long enough for a cry to spring from Ingrid’s lips despite the importance of absolute silence at a time like this. And then, crash, with a capital C, and all the other letters capitalized too. CRASH. A paralyzing landing and she crumpled up, the wind knocked out of her. Maybe paralyzed for real. Then came cacophony, more concentrated noise than she’d ever heard in her life: a wild multichannel soundtrack for a movie—banging trash cans, hubcaps rocketing across a resonating floor, whole glass factories shattering; a wicked symphony that went on and on. When it was over, the silence that followed was even worse. Except for one final sound: the high window banging shut.
Ingrid got her breath back. She tried to wriggle her fingers. They wriggled. Could she move? Yes. She rolled over, got to her knees. Flashlight: still on her belt loop. Was it working? Yes. Ingrid panned the beam across the room, a furnace room full of shadows, cobwebs, newspaper stacks, junk. The trash cans she’d landed on had spilled garbage all over the place. The hubcaps were close to real hubcaps—trash-can lids; and the glass factories were smashed glass cabinets full of ceramic knickknacks, now mostly in pieces. Dust motes by the billion floated in the flashlight beam.
Ingrid rose, picked up her pom-pom hat, brushed something horrible and sticky from her hair. Other girls—smarter ones—were home in bed now, happily—
She froze. A voice spoke in the alley. She switched off the flash.
“Wha’ the hell was tha’?” a man said
“Wha’?” said another man.
“You din hear nothin’?”
“Wha’?”
Then came a tiny splashing sound, maybe two parallel splashing sounds. After that Ingrid heard a quick zip zip of zippering up.
“Dju see a light?”
“Wha’?”
“Light on in Katie’s cellar.”
“Nope.”
“Nope?” Pause. “Don’ matter anyhow. Here’s to Katie.”
“Katie.”
Ingrid heard what might have been bottles clinking together.
“Hey! Wha’s with the grate?”
“Grate?”
“Window grate. Lookit.”
“Stick it back on.”
Grunt. “Like so?”
“Close enough.”
Drunken footsteps moved off.
She wanted to get out of there, get back to her own bed. But the window was closed now and well out of reach, the grate back on. She had no choice but to go up the crude wooden stairs she’d spotted on the far side of the room.
Ingrid mounted the stairs, all of them creaky and coated with dust. At the top she came to a partly open door. A calendar from the Norwich National Bank hung on it. The month was June, the year 1987. Ingrid calmed down. No one in the house, nothing to be alarmed about. Night was the same as day except for lighting. And those cleats: She had to have them. Get a grip.
Ingrid pushed the door open, found herself in the kitchen. She beamed the light around: back door leading to the alley, heaps of dishes in the sink, a half-full glass of water on the counter, fridge in the corner, humming away. Ingrid opened it. There was food inside—chocolate milk, Smucker’s blueberry jam, three pink-glazed doughnuts. So weird: Kate dead, but her life kept on going a little while longer. She’d probably been looking forward to those doughnuts.
Ingrid walked down the long corridor to the purple-and-gold parlor. What had happened here? She’d taken out the red Pumas with the idea of putting them on to save time. Then the taxi had beeped and she’d hurried out. So the cleats would have been right here. Ingrid shone the light around. No cleats, nothing on the floor at all. She tried the sagging pink couch, on top and under, found cigarette butts and empty VO bottles just like Grampy’s, but no red cleats.
Where else? Maybe nowhere, maybe time to go. She’d made an honest effort, if breaking into a house in the middle of the night could be called honest. Then she remembered assistant Coach Trimble: Playing hard, an honest effort, wasn’t the same as playing to win. Ingrid went into the hall, gazed at the stairs leading up into darkness, up where she’d heard a footstep although Cracked-Up Katie lived alone, up where she really didn’t want to go.
Ingrid climbed the stairs. At the top was a room barred off with a strip of yellow police tape. She stood next to it, shone her light into the room beyond, a bedroom, although that wasn’t the first thing she noticed. The first thing she noticed was the sprawled outline of a human body, chalked on the floor. The second thing she noticed was the pile of shoes beside the closet door. The gold lamé stilettos were there. So were the red Pumas.
POLICE LINE, it said on the tape. DO NOT CROSS. Ingrid knew that was important, all about protecting evidence. She also knew that she wasn’t Kate’s killer, and therefore the red Pumas couldn’t really be called evidence, were just on the wrong side of the tape by accident. What harm could possibly result if she simply ducked under the yellow tape, like so, walked carefully around the chalked outline, and picked up the red Pumas—yes!—while touching absolutely nothing else? No possible harm whatsoever. Ingrid held the Pumas tight. Griddie: playing to win.
She turned to go, already planning her exit strategy—touching nothing, using that back door to the alley, home before you knew it—when her beam lit on a stack of playbills on the bedside table. And not just any playbills, but playbills from the Prescott Players, old ones, yellowed and beat up with age. Funny, the way she’d been telling Kate about the Prescott Players and up here in her bedroom were these playbills. The top one featured a production of Dial M for Murder, a play Ingrid had never heard of, and showed a photo of a young blond actress with frightened eyes facing a silhouetted man. Was there something familiar about that actress? Ingrid bent closer. Yes. Kate, even younger and prettier than in The Echo photograph. The very moment Ingrid made that connect
ion, a windowpane shattered somewhere downstairs.
She cut the light at once, stood very still, listening. Had she imagined it? Or had the sound come from the alley, not from inside the house? Ingrid listened with all her might, heard nothing but her own heartbeat, pounding in her ears. The imagination could be very powerful, plus those two drunks might be walking back, dropping bottles in the alley, so chances were—
A footstep on the stairs. Ingrid heard it, clear, distinct, real.
Those little creatures, rabbits and such, that freeze at the sight of a rearing snake and wait meekly to die: for a moment she knew what they felt, understood preferring death to terror. Then she remembered what Grampy said about the point where fear stopped helping and started hurting. She dove under Cracked-Up Katie’s bed.
Another footstep, soft but closer. Then a few more, followed by silence. Ingrid pictured someone standing by the police tape. She even thought she sensed the force of a straining human mind. A narrow beam of light flashed on, arced across the floor, then up and out of her sight. She heard a soft grunt: a man ducking under the tape. Ingrid knew it was a man from the sound of the grunt.
The footsteps drew closer. The feet themselves came into view, lit by the soft edges of the narrow beam: dirty, man-size tennis sneakers with those three Adidas stripes, spattered with dark-green paint.
The feet were still. Ingrid heard the man breathing. Could he hear her? She held her breath. The feet shifted a little. Something shuffled. A playbill fluttered to the floor, inches from Ingrid’s face—the Dial M for Murder playbill. The man made a sound in his throat, harsh and metallic. Then came another grunt and a gloved hand appeared, long and narrow, feeling under the bed. The fanning fingers came so close to Ingrid’s face that she could feel the breeze, smell the combination of glove leather and absorbed sweat. The hand encountered the playbill, settled, picked it up.
The Adidas feet moved away. A small circle of light jerked across the opposite wall in the direction of the door and vanished. The man grunted once more—that would be him ducking under the yellow tape. His steps faded away, down, down. Ingrid, her ear already to the floor, listened hard, thought she heard a door close down below—that would be the kitchen door leading to the alley. She let out her breath, what was left of it, which wasn’t much.